Marketplace Morning Report for Wednesday, September 26, 2012

More protests are expected in Spain today after some big demonstrations last night. There's outrage over a new round of budget cuts as Spain tries to avoid becoming the next Greece. The office supply chain Staples has announced plans for a complete overhaul. The company appears to be taking a page out of Best Buy's playbook. And Marina Von Neumann Whitman is the daughter of the famous mathematician, John von Neuman. But she managed to beat the odds and come out from her father's shadow, going on to serve as the first woman ever on the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

More protests are expected in Spain today after some big demonstrations last night. There's outrage over a new round of budget cuts as Spain tries to avoid becoming the next Greece. New home sales in the U.S. fell in August. A new study finds that total knee replacements have more than doubled in the past two decades. What does that mean for health care costs? Plus, stories on wind farms in Oregon, 3-D printing retailers, and the controversial NFL call that led to a loss for the Green Bay Packers.

Greece has been shut down today because of a huge nationwide strike. Fifty thousand people took to the streets of Athens and police fired tear gas after violence broke out near the parliament. The issue, of course, is austerity: The very unpopular budget cuts going on as part of the solution to the debt crisis.

We’re getting another pulse check on housing later this morning. The numbers on new home sales for August come out today, and they’re expected to be pretty good. How does an uptick in housing affect the job market? Turns out, they are pretty closely linked.

One of the world's largest wind farms officially came online this week in Eastern Oregon, with 300 giant turbines spread over dozens of miles. But the announcement comes at a time of uncertainty for the industry.

A group representing British banks is giving up its responsibility for setting a key global interest rate. The British Bankers Association will no longer control LIBOR -- the London Interbank Offered Rate. That's the benchmark for hundreds of trillions
of dollars in mortgages, student loans and other transactions around the world.